As telecommunications networks increase in size and complexity, the amount of information processed within such networks has increased dramatically. As a result, the efficient and fast administration and monitoring of this information has become more challenging. As the networks handle more information, the ability to collect, store and monitor performance data for the operation of the network becomes more difficult.
Several nodes In telecommunications networks (such as, for example, a Radio Network Controller in a UMTS radio access network) issue performance data as discrete “events”. Such events are stored for further processing, but this is difficult due to the high rate of such events. In order to reduce the demands on storage space, after a predetermined time the events are typically aggregated into counters, and the original events deleted.
In some circumstances, counters are too rigid. This problem has been addressed in some systems by the provision of programmable counters. Communication nodes issue events that are combined into counters according to a programmable logic before they are stored. This approach means that flexible counters can be defined, but suffers from the disadvantage that events are instantly “reduced” to counters as soon as they have issued.
Another proposed system combines the approaches described above. Some events may be stored unchanged, and some may be combined into “transaction records”. It is up to the user to delete old data.
Other approaches reduce the storage of counters by skipping those counter values that do not contain significantly different information. Data is often also compressed to reduce storage.
All of the existing solutions struggle to find a balance between the fact that it is beneficial to store detailed event records, but that this requires too much storage space. In some arrangements events are aggregated into counters. These counters lack detailed attributes, occupy very little storage space and can therefore be stored for a long time. The disadvantage of counters is that they cannot be used for fault localization or advanced performance analysis. In some arrangements the data is compressed, but this approach also has its limitations. Some kind of information reduction is inevitable to store network-wide data for long periods of time.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to mitigate the problems presented above. It is further an object of the invention to provide a system for managing performance data to reduce storage space while retaining sufficient information for meaningful performance analysis.